Ben's Blog ItemsCredenda|agenda: things to be believed, things to be donehttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/Table/History/
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 20:18:09 +0000Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Managementen-gbWhy I Am a Stratfordianhttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/History/why-i-am-a-stratfordian.html
http://www.credenda.org/index.php/History/why-i-am-a-stratfordian.htmlEditor’s Note: Astute rememberers will recall that we have gone into print on the Stratfordian/Oxfordian question before. If you don’t recall that, you can refresh your memory here. In our previous assault on the public, we discussed some interesting possibilities surrounding an Oxfordian authorship of the Shakespeare plays. Here, in an admirable display of even-handedness, we present Peter Leithart’s thoughts on the subject. Enjoy.

On September 25, 1987, the American University in Washington DC sponsored a moot court in the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church. Presiding over the court were three Supreme Court justices: Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, and John Paul Stevens. More than a thousand people turned out hear Peter Jaszi and James Boyle debate the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Jaszi argued that Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, had written the plays, while Boyle argued for the Stratfordian burgher and actor William Shakespeare. All three justices concluded that the Oxford case was unproven, though the de Vere Society Newsletter later complained that Brennan was more a witness for the Stratfordians than an impartial judge.

Some try law courts; some try séances. In the early 1940s, Percy Allen, a supporter of the Oxfordian view, went to a London medium named Hester Dowden, who had lengthy conversations with Shakespeare, Bacon, and Oxford, and confirmed that Oxford had filled in the sketchy outlines that Shakespeare came up with.

The Oxfordian view dates back to the early part of the twentieth century, to a English schoolmaster named Thomas Looney (pronounced, most unfortunately, “loney” rather than “loony”), whose book Shakespeare ‘Identified’ (1920) laid out the Oxfordian case. Looney was not the first to doubt the standard account of the playwright’s life. During the middle part of the nineteenth century, a pitiable woman from Hartford, CT, Delia Bacon, published a book on the philosophy of Shakespeare’s plays in which she argued that Francis Bacon, whom she eventually claimed as a forebear, had written the plays. She received grudging aid from Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thomas Carlyle, though none believed her. Bacon believed that the evidence could be found in Shakespeare’s grave, and snuck into Holy Trinity in Stratford late one night to poke around in an unsuccessful search for confirmation of her theory.

The authorship of Shakespeare’s plays has been established in the way that authorship is established for everyone in the Elizabethan age. His name appears on published editions of the plays and poems. He is known to have been an actor who performed the plays that were published under his byline. He was part owner of Globe Theater. Contemporaries say he was a playwright and poet. Ben Jonson called him a friend, and described him as an actor and playwright. Critic Francis Meres spoke of Shakespeare as author of sonnets, and the Oxford don Leonard Digges said that Shakespeare was known for his plays and sonnets.

Yet, the “quest of the historical Shakespeare” goes on, and asking Why? is worth a moment’s reflection. Two reasons stand out. First, it seems we know tantalizingly little about Shakespeare. We know the date of his baptism but not of his birth. Little is known of his education. There are the famous “lost years” between his departure from Stratford and marriage to Anne Hathaway and his appearance in London. Second, what we know doesn’t seem to fit with what we expect from the greatest poet of the English language, the “man of the millennium.” The records from the late sixteenth century are mainly court records, purchases and sales of property, lawsuits. It’s a thoroughly bourgeois, not to mention a startlingly litigious life, not the life of a poet or artiste.

To both of these suspicions there are compelling responses. To the first: Our “ignorance” of Shakespeare is more apparent than real. Christopher Marlowe left no manuscripts or letters, and nobody mentioned his work as a playwright during his lifetime. John Webster, author the Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil left no biographical trace – not the date and place of his birth and death, nor the place where he was educated. We know far less of Shakespeare than we do about literary figures from the following centuries, but we know a great deal more about him than we do about most literary figures of his own time. Were it not for Shakespeare’s titanic stature, there were be no conspiracy theories, no furtive searches of his grave, no moot court. It all makes for great fun, but nobody does it for Marlowe or Webster, poor fellows.

To the second: It is no accident that the first doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship surfaced in the Romantic period, when conceptions of art and authorship changed radically. Literature came to be seen as self-expression, and poets were expected to wear a persona. The authorship question is bound up with a post- Romantic belief that the true artist has to be a man who lives by his own unconventional lights. That is a very specific, and very recent, notion of authorship. Anti-Stratfordian Christmas Humphreys spoke volumes when he expressed his dismay at the “worship the memory of a petty-minded tradesman.” For all we know, most artists and poets prior to the modern period were “petty-minded tradesmen.”

Why am I a Stratfordian? Finally, my stance is negative. I have heard no convincing evidence that makes me budge from the obvious.

]]>pjliethart@brainfog.com (Peter J. Leithart)HistoryMon, 04 Jul 2011 16:37:30 +0000Oriental Romehttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/History/oriental-rome.html
http://www.credenda.org/index.php/History/oriental-rome.htmlLargely because of the divisions among disciplines in our universities, I suppose, we tend to think of Bible and Classical world in different categories. Of course, we know that Alexander swept through, that Rome took over Palestine, and Pilate the Roman governor put Jesus on a cross. Yet we often miss the depth and extent of contact between East and West.

A series of events from the early third century illustrates how deep the contacts of East and West were, and how long they persisted.

One spring evening in the year 218 A.D., the emperor Macrinus was enjoying dinner at Apamea. News of a coup led by Antoninus was disturbing, but Macrinus had confidence that his commander, Ulpius Julianus, would be able to handle it. Meanwhile, Macrinus could sit to enjoy his dinner. But the banquet turned macabre when a messenger was brought in and presented the emperor with the Ulpius’ head.

Soon enough, Macrinus too was dead, and a new emperor had been proclaimed by the army.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was proclaimed emperor on May 16, 218. He was a man of many names. Originally known as Avitus, he is better known by the name of the Phoenician mountain god, Elagabalus, who showed himself on earth as a meteorite and whom Avitus served as priest. Once established as emperor, he clothed himself in “purple robes embroidered in gold; to his necklaces and bracelets he added a crown, a tiara glittering with gold and jewels,” an outfit that “showed the influence of the sacred robe of the Phoenicians and the luxurious garb of the Medes.” “Accompanied by flutes and drums,” Herodian wrote, “he went about performing, as it appeared, orgiastic service to his god” (Herodian, Roman History, 5.5).

Elagabalus arrived in Rome as emperor in the fall of 219, and quickly installed his patron deity in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Early the next year, he proclaimed Elagabalus as the head of the Roman pantheon, and he began to issue coins bearing images of the emperor identified as “priest of the sun god Elagabalus.”

Dio Cassius found the whole thing appalling. Passing over “the barbaric chants which Sardanapalus, together with his mother and grandmother, chanted to Elagabalus, or the secret sacrifices that he offered to him, slaying boys and using charms” and “shutting up alive in the god's temple a lion, a monkey, and a snake, and throwing in among them human genitals,” he reserved his most severe criticism for “the extreme absurdity of courting a wife for Elagabalus — as if the god had any need of marriage and children!” (Dio Cassius, Roman History, 80.11-12).

To traditional Romans, Elagabalus’ religious life was just another expression of his utter, and utterly oriental, debauchery. Donning a wig, he frequented taverns at night, playing the prostitute, and would stand at the door of his room naked soliciting sexual favors from members of his court who passed by (Dio Cassius, Roman History, 80.13).

Sometime in 221, he staged a triumphal procession for his god through the streets of Rome, leading the god to his residence in the magnificent temple he had built. He placed the god in a chariot drawn by six huge white horses, held the reins, and ran backward in front of the chariot down a pavement covered with gold dust. People lined the streets holding torches and tossing wreaths and flowers at the passing god and his imperial guide. Once he arrived at the temple, he climbed a tower and threw gold, silver, and expensive cloth to the people below. Many, Herodian claims, “lost their lives in the ensuing scramble, impaled on the soldiers’ spears or trampled to death” (Herodian, Roman History, 5.6).

It was not long before the Romans had had enough. On March 11, 221, the guards revolted and put Elagabalus under house arrest. He tried to hide in a trunk, but was found out and decapitated.

When he died, Elagabalus was eighteen.

We tend to think of the influence as one-directional, from the classical world to the East rather than the opposite. A moment’s reflection will expose the implausibility of that assumption, and scholars have recently been highlighting the fact that the “Hellenization of Judaism” involved not a little “Judaizing of Hellenism.”

Next time you’re tempted to think of the East and West, ancient or modern, as closed and mutually impenetrable systems, tell yourself the story of Elagabalus. Tell yourself, “Then there was the time when the Roman emperor thought he should worship a Phoenician god. . . .”